Save the Media

The sad end to the Rocky Mountain News last week has triggered a lot of soul searching among the journalistic community. What does it mean? Is the demise of newspapers inevitable? Are we all doomed? Will I have a job next week, next month, next year?

I try very hard to make this blog an upbeat place. I see little value in moaning and groaning. I’m an action gal. Don’t like your life; change it.

But I can’t help but weigh in here.

Do I think the death of newspapers is inevitable?

A post by Jeffrey S. Klein at the The Media Biz got me thinking about this question in a very focused way. He cites Glenn Thrush, of Politico, who writes that newspaper “management saw the Web threat coming for a long time and tried everything, too much, to cope — all to no avail.”

When I clicked on Thrush’s blog, I found he’s responding to a post-mortem of the RMN by The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. Kurtz quotes San Francisco Chronicle editor at large Phil Bronstein, saying that most of the wounds in the newspapers industry are self-inflicted. “The public was seen as kind of messy and icky and not soething you needed to get involved with,” Bronstein says in Kurtz’s piece.

However, Klein notes that newspapers have played a big part in their own demise. They had the content, but didn’t use it wisely. “Newspapers had to stop thinking of themselves as the MASS MEDIA in a world of niche, targeted marketing and advertising.”

My take: I’m not so sure newspaper execs saw the Web coming, though they should have. And I’m utterly convinced they didn’t try everything they could. Why? Because they are still not trying everything they could.

I think newspapers were a bit like teenagers. They saw themselves as invincible. That big bad Web can’t hurt me.  So with blinders on they kept doing the same ol’, same ol’ even as circulation continued to drop.

Sure, they tried small tweaks.

I remember when putting a graphic with your story was going to save journalism, and all the reporters complained just like they do now about social media or blogging. And then it was writing stories with bullets like a big list. Or using a narrative voice. Or skipping the story completely, and just running a graphic.

But there was no dramatic shift in thinking.

When the Web seemed a force to be reckoned with, newspapers threw up Web sites that looked just like the newspapers — but online. At first some charged for content, but most abandoned that.

But they didn’t study the Web or understand its power of interaction. They didn’t invent ways to reach readers online or figure out how readers were using the Web. They didn’t charge their smartest employees with coming up with ways to make money on the Internet. They shrugged it off because though circulation declines had been going on for years, they were still making money the old-fashioned way, in print.

And they expected readers to do what they had always done; read what newspapers told tell them to read in the way newspapers tell them to read it. Many didn’t even update their sites, so you’d go online and find old news.

I do think some many journalists saw the public as “messy and icky.” Or irrelevant. It was a paternalistic model. We know what the public needs; the public can’t be trusted to know what it wants.

Eventually,  things hit a crisis point. Newspapers realized. “Whoa, this Web thing isn’t going away, and now we have bloggers to contend with.” So they started blogs and beefed up Web sites and made attempts to aggregate and interact.  But they didn’t emulate what the non-journo bloggers were doing; they eyed them suspiciously. And they still didn’t really listen to readers. Or read the bloggers who were making money online.

I’m sorry I’m being so negative. I promise it’s a momentary lapse. But to me what the demise of the RMN means — in addition to the sadness I feel for those personally impacted –  is we need to get going. We need to take the blinders off, stop pretending it’s 1985 still and really be online-first news organizations.

The death of newspapers might be inevitable. But the death of journalism doesn’t have to be. That is really up to all of us.

– Gina